Older Reviews

Guildhall was a surprise release by Alderac in 2012, there were no announcements or anything, the game was just there. Now the expansion/sequel Job Faire is out and was much less secretive. I guess we could all see the expansion coming. Just like its predecessor, its better if you don’t think about the game to thematically, if the medieval guild system had really worked like this game we’d still only have five bricklayers in the world, and where would we be then, as a civilisation? We probably wouldn’t be hating our fellow man over a card game, that’s where. And that would mean we’re not playing Guildhall.

Many of us gamers have spent countless hours of our lives fighting the Great Old Ones. But do we even know why? Have we done the research on that one? Maybe under the reign of Cthulhu, Azathoth and their like there would be free cotton candy for everyone. You now have the chance to do that research. But be careful, the knowledge of the Old Ones quickly leads to insanity – as you will find out when playing Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc’s Pocket Madness.

Space. The Final Frontier. These are the adventures of giant turtle Great A’tuin, her four elephant companions standing on her shell and the millions of people living on the world they carry. This is the Discworld, and that muddy brown spot over there is Ankh-Morpork, home to a million people and more drama than any other city in the multiverse.

Mascarade is proof that a good game doesn’t need many components. With just 13 cards and some paper coins, Bruno Faidutti created an intense game of bluff and confusion that works for up to 13 players.

This is the game you will never find on Google. Because the name of the game is The Game, and that’s just not very distinctive. The Game is a cooperative card game that was nominated for the 2015 Spiel des Jahres. It’s small and abstract, but that doesn’t say anything about how much fun it is.

The human race has never been peaceful, competition is written into our genes. Even back in the stone age, when we just started abandoning easily movable tents for more permanent dwellings, there was competition for having the biggest house, highest up the hill. That’s what is happening in Höyük, neolithic clans competing for the finest mansions.

Russian Railroads is a European optimization game, subtype worker placement. Every game, you try to do better than the one before, optimize your strategy and score a bit higher. But it’s not a typical game of the genre. Where you often have a lack of options in other such games, only one or two routes to victory which you try to use as well as you can, Russian Railroads gives you many different, viable ways to score. Its many moving parts create a fascinating whole that will let you find new ways to a higher score for a long time.